The Insecurity State

Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law

Peter Ramsay

Offers an original explanatory theory of current trends in criminal law and criminal justice policy

Develops a theoretical explanation of the criminal law from a detailed analysis and reconstruction of the New Labour's penal policies in the UK

Explains how preventive criminal laws have arisen from a deficit of political authority rather than from excessive authoritarianism

Offers a criminal law theory that is unorthodox in both its method and its content

The Insecurity State

Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law

Peter Ramsay

Description

The Insecurity State is a book about the recent emergence of a 'right to security' in the UK's criminal law. The Insecurity State sets out from a detailed analysis of the law of the Anti-Social Behavior Order and of the Coalition government's proposed replacement for it. It shows that the liabilities contained in both seek to protect a 'freedom from fear' and that this 'right to security' explains a lot of other recently enacted criminal offences. This book identifies the normative source of this right to security in the idea of vulnerable autonomy. It demonstrates that the vulnerability of autonomy is an axiomatic assumption of political theories that have enjoyed a preponderant influence right across the political mainstream. It considers the influence of these
normative commitments on the policy of both the New Labour and the Coalition governments. The Insecurity State then explores how the wider contemporary criminal law also institutionalizes the right to security, and how this differs from the law's earlier protection of security interests. It examines the right to security, and its attendant penal liabilities, in the context of both human rights protection and normative criminal law theories. Finally the book exposes the paradoxical claims about the state's authority that are entailed by penal laws that assume the vulnerability of the normal, representative citizen.

The Insecurity State offers a criminal law theory that is unorthodox in both its method and its content:- It is focused on a contemporary development in the
'special part' of the criminal law rather than the law's general principles.- It is an explanatory political sociology of substantive criminal law rather than the more familiar normative theory; but it is an explanatory theory that seeks to understand the law's historical development through an investigation of the changing character of its normative order.- It does not apply a pre-existing sociological or philosophical theory to the law; rather it develops a theoretical explanation from detailed legal analysis and reconstruction of New Labour's penal laws.- It concludes that repressive criminal laws have arisen from a deficit of political authority rather than from excessive authoritarianism.

The Insecurity State

Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law

Peter Ramsay

Table of Contents

Introduction1: Failure to Reassure as Threat2: Failure to Reassure as Public Wrong3: Freedom from Fear4: The Reassurance Gap5: The Ideology of Vulnerable Autonomy6: The Right to Security and the ECHR7: The Right to Security Beyond the ASBO8: Security Interests in the Criminal Law9: The Right to Security in Criminal Law Theory10: The Insecurity StateAfterword: On the Future of Authority